Last weekend's United Nations conference on climate change in Bali was a classic example of how shape and content change almost completely depending upon one's perspective.

Last weekend's United Nations conference on climate change in Bali was a classic example of how shape and content change almost completely depending upon one's perspective.

Whether the outcome should be regarded, as most environmental activists do, as a bitter disappointment, or, as the diplomats would have it, as an accomplishment, depends on whether you prefer viewing a bottle as half-empty or as half-full.

As both would seem the best answer – with, to show my own bias, a definite tilt toward the positive.

The principal argument made by the naysayers is exceedingly persuasive. No agreement was reached on binding targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

A proposal, pushed insistently by the European Union, for the rich nations to agree on a cut in emissions of up to 40 per cent (from 1990 levels) by 2020, was relegated to a mere footnote.

No one is therefore committed to doing anything different from today which, for several nations, most notably the U.S. and Canada, means doing precious little.

So, we'll keep on getting hotter while time continues to pass.

The yeasayers have a good case also, though. Despite coming close to a breakup several times, the assembly of 192 nations agreed eventually on a program of negotiations to achieve a binding pact by the end of 2009. An opportunity now exists to keep alive the Kyoto Protocol which otherwise will expire in 2012.

Agreeing to meet again to try to agree doesn't sound like a lot. It was, this time.

The last-minute U.S. concession – after other national delegates booed its delegates during one public session, an almost unprecedented act at such international gatherings – was real. It has signed on to a process whereby it has accepted to be everyone's favourite target for at least the next two years.

More significant is the timing of this new schedule of negotiations. Its deadline, and a major part of the talks, will take place after George W. Bush has left office.

Almost any new U.S. president, let alone either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, is bound to be more open and conciliatory.

This is of course no guarantee of success. But the agreement to try to agree that was reached at Bali thus will be conducted in far more agreeable circumstances than those of today.

And there was another positive accomplishment at Bali, even though its substantive content was insubstantial.

Any global program to deal with climate change has to be global itself.

At the original Kyoto conference in 1997, this was ignored. The binding targets agreed on there (the ones Canada then proceeded to break), applied only to the wealthy, developed nations.

Back then, this seemed to be fair. The climate crisis has been caused virtually entirely by the developed world's extravagant use of fossil fuels.

We can no longer afford to look only in the rear-view mirror, though. Every week, China opens a new coal-fired plant. Even if all the rich nations closed down every plant and ordered every car to remain in the driveway, the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere would increase by 2070 to the tipping point of 450 parts per million.

At Bali, China and India hid behind the U.S. While it was being bashed, they could remain silent. The late U.S. concession, though, put the spotlight on these "late polluters" and other comparable if smaller ones such as Indonesia and Brazil.

No agreement was reached at Bali on how developing nations should be included in any global pact. But the argument that they have to play their part was expressed openly for the first time at an international climate change conference (including by Canadian Environment Minister John Baird).

There's merit to China's call for a transfer of anti-polluting technology from rich to poor. Obviously, the emission targets cannot be the same for all.

But either China and India and the others join the march or the U.S. and Canada, and others like Japan, will drop out, or at best straggle behind unwillingly. The global scale of the crisis is without precedent; so must be the response to it.

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